Lean Machines

I consider a laptop as essential a travel item as my three-ounce toothpaste. Unfortunately, that dependency has typically left me with a tough choice: break the bank or my back. Most laptops weigh a shoulder-crushing five to seven pounds, while waifs under four pounds come with hefty price tags. But in the last year, a number of new options promised to lighten my load. I carried three of the latest—the much hyped MacBook Air and lesser-known models from two Taiwanese companies—on various trips and tried common tasks on each, including Web surfing, editing a Word document sent to me as an e-mail attachment, watching a movie, posting a blog entry, and uploading photos. Each laptop had its strengths and weaknesses, but the takeaway was clear: There's never been a better time to be a laptop-toting traveler.

It's not easy to turn heads at the Consumer Electronics Show, an annual gadget-industry gathering in Las Vegas, but I elicited envious glances every time I pulled out the hardcover-size Eee. I handled its shrunken keyboard clumsily at first, but within a couple of hours I was touch-typing comfortably. The screen, however, was a different story; I found myself constantly squinting and scrolling to read e-mails and Web pages on the seven-inch display.

Asus keeps the Eee affordable with two key money-savers. First, it replaced Windows with a custom version of Linux. This free operating system can be geeky and complex, but Eee's interface is the simplest I've seen: Big, easy-to-identify icons denote typical tasks such as Web browsing and e-mail. Second, the Eee swaps a traditional hard drive for just a few gigabytes of flash memory. Still, I never ran out of room on the road, even after down-loading a movie. Battery life was decent: I still had an hour left after watching the nearly two-hour movie.

Asus now has a model with Windows XP. It still won't replace your home computer, but at this price, you can buy one just to keep in your go bag.

Since my business uses Macs, Apple's MacBook Air is what I've been waiting for: an extremely light (just three pounds) laptop that doesn't force me to compromise—most of the time. Apple did leave out a CD/DVD drive as well as all ports save a single USB jack and a video-out connection. But during the course of several trips, only once did I find myself wanting a CD drive (to install a software application), and Apple does sell a slim external drive for $100.

I loved the Air the most when I was, well, in the air: It was so thin that I easily stowed it in the seat pocket, saving myself precious legroom. If you want to watch a movie in flight, you'll have to download it from iTunes (before the flight) since the Air has no drive. Battery life was well short of the five hours Apple claimed: Even with the screen dimmed and the Wi-Fi off, I consistently got about three hours. At these prices, which don't include Apple's Office-like iWork suite, it's hard to justify the Air as a second machine. But it's powerful enough to run any application you throw at it, so if you're a Mac diehard who travels frequently, why not make it your primary computer?

Somewhere between a smartphone and a laptop, this ultra-mobile PC runs two operating systems: Windows Vista Business, which works with the keyboard, and Origami, Microsoft's touch-screen mode for quick access to the Internet, movies, and music. It also includes a built-in cellular modem for always-on Internet. In theory, it's the perfect hybrid.

In practice, however, it was the least useful of the three laptops I tested. Though the keyboard is larger than that of a smartphone—and the screen tilts up so you can set the Shift on a table—the keys were too small for me to touch-type and too big for me to thumb-type, so entering even a Web address was frustrating. Once I got to the site I wanted, however, I appreciated being able to scroll around using just my finger on the touch screen; you can even "flick" the screen to go back or scroll quickly.

I barely noticed that I was carrying the two-pound Shift, and the ability to quickly look up a movie time or a map was great. Only you can decide whether its limited utility (the battery rarely lasted two hours) is worth the $1,500 price tag.